CHAPTER 5

Project Scheduling

Remember how in Chapter 4 we pointed out that the work breakdown

structure (WBS) breaks the project down into deliverables rather than
activities? Well now comes the time when we define the actual activi-
ties needed to be performed to complete the project. As you may have
guessed, we will use the lowest level deliverables from the WBS—the
work packages—as inspiration. Creating the project schedule is incred-
ibly important because once your sponsor approves it, the schedule will
serve as a baseline for all the project work you and your team perform.
You will be judged based on how well your project is able to stay on
schedule as well as on the project’s cost and quality.
A realistic project schedule considers several possible limitations. First,
there may be a logical order in which some activities can be performed
and we address this first by sequencing the activities. Second, each activ-
ity takes a certain amount of time and we cover this by estimating how
long each activity will take. We will show the schedule on an easy-to-read
Gantt chart. Third, we may not have all of the specific people we need
exactly when we need them. We address this by assigning workers to each
activity and then looking at all of the assignments to see if anyone is
overloaded. If they are, we try to reduce the problem by comparing the as-
signments with the schedule. Fourth, some project schedules are limited
by cash flow, which we address in the next chapter.
The purpose of this chapter is to help you:

1. Create a project schedule by defining and sequencing work activities

into a network schedule and then identifying the critical path.
2. Communicate the project schedule simply by using a Gantt chart.
3. Assign a worker to each activity, identify where worker demand is
overloaded, and resolve some of those overloads by “playing Tetris.”
70 PROJECT MANAGEMENT ESSENTIALS

Defining Work Activities

During this stage of planning, it is essential that you involve the people
who will actually be performing the project work, whether they are team
members, subject matter experts (SMEs), or others. Whoever it is needs
to have a high degree of understanding about what the project entails. By
looking at each work package, they should have a good idea of what needs
to be done to complete each deliverable according to the acceptance crite-
ria. In this way, you will generate a lengthy list of all the various activities
that comprise your project.
List each activity on its own Post-it note, and make sure that each
activity has a name (the more self-explanatory, the better!) that is short
and begins with a verb. The more people you involve in this process,
the more thorough your list will be. And although it may be difficult or
time-consuming to involve many people—especially from a wide variety
of disciplines or departments—it will be time and energy well-spent. Re-
member, your schedule will be based on these activities, so any forgotten
activities risk delaying your project and making you look bad. Exhibit 5.1
is an example of an activity list.

Exhibit 5.1
Activity List
• Purchase wood (PW)
• String electrical wires (SEW)
• Install railings (IR)
• Assemble ramp (AR)
• Hang paneling (HP)
• Install fixtures (IF)
• Paint all wood (PAW)
• Turn on electricity (TOE)

Sequencing Work Activities

Once your activities have been defined, it is time to sequence them.
Again, let the more knowledgeable members guide the rest of the team
through this process. Since each activity is listed on a Post-it note, use a
 PROJECT SCHEDULING 71

table or wall to begin putting them in logical order; put any activities that
can start immediately (in other words, they don’t depend on any other
project activities to be completed) at the far left of your table or wall. Put
activities that you know will take place toward the end of the project at
the far right. Using the collective judgment and experience of the team,
determine logical orders for each and every activity you have. Show the
relationships between activities with arrows, with the work of the project
flowing from left to right chronologically.
Note that each activity can have more than one predecessor activity
(which must be performed before it) and/or more than one successor activ-
ity (which cannot be performed until after the given activity). Keep in
mind that you are not yet factoring in such logic as how many workers
you have or how many activities can realistically be performed simultane-
ously. For now, it is important that you sequence your activities so that
each activity takes place as soon as possible, based only on the activities
that are its logical predecessors. If more than one activity can begin right
away (with no predecessor), create a Post-it note that just says start and
have arrows from it go to the activities that can start immediately. The
same holds true at the end: if there is more than one activity with noth-
ing following, create a Post-it note that says end. When you calculate the
schedule you will understand the value of having a single start and end.
An example of this type of sequencing logic for a small project is shown
in Exhibit 5.2.
On large projects you will use scheduling software such as Micro-
soft Project. However, even then, project software requires you to be a
knowledgeable user and to identify predecessor and successor activities.
Software can do a good deal of the tedious part of scheduling for you, but
it cannot read your mind! Unless you tell it otherwise, Microsoft Project
will assign each activity its default setting of beginning immediately and
lasting a day. As you can imagine, a “schedule” that looks like this would
be beyond useless. You, the project manager, need to understand the logic
behind the sequencing of your activities. That is important both now, as
you are creating a schedule, and throughout the life cycle of your project.
When trade-offs have to be made or a project sped up, it is your under-
standing of the logical sequence and dependencies of activities that will
help you make the best decisions for your team and project.
72 PROJECT MANAGEMENT ESSENTIALS

On Agile projects, you can also use Post-it notes to determine the
sequence of detailed activities within the iteration you are planning. This
visual flow of work can be posted for the entire team to see.

Exhibit 5.2
Small Project Logical Order of Activities

Estimating Activity Duration

Once your activities have been sequenced, it is time to estimate how long
each one will take. Yet again, the people who create the estimates should
be the ones who will be performing—and therefore understand better
than anyone else—the activities at hand. That said, you as the project
manager need to have a good enough understanding of the activities or
to at least seek a second opinion if you think there’s a chance that the
estimates are incorrect. Some workers may overestimate the amount of
time necessary in order to pad their estimates; these could unnecessar-
ily slow down your project or even prevent you from getting the bid if
you are competing for project work. On the other hand, some workers
may be overly optimistic about how quickly they can accomplish certain
 PROJECT SCHEDULING 73

activities; if unchecked, this could set you up for the stress of falling
behind schedule and disappointing your customers and sponsor.
Some activities will be much shorter than others, but it is important
you use the same unit of time for all. So, decide in advance if you will
use weeks, workdays, or hours. Conflicting units of time make schedul-
ing much more difficult and accident-prone. Exhibit 5.3 continues the
example started previously with time estimates in work hours shown for
each activity in the bottom center of each square. In some fields, such as
construction, there are professionally developed standards as to how long
certain activities take, scalable to the size of the job. The American Physi-
cal Plant Association, International Facility Manager’s Association, and
others have this information documented in their benchmarking data.
If your project is in an industry that has standards such as these, by all
means use them!
As an appendage to your activity duration estimates, it is good prac-
tice to include any assumptions you made in calculating them, as well as
your degree of certainty in the estimates. For example, in creating your
estimate for placing electrical wires, did you assume all your diagrams for
the building were accurate and up-to-date or did you assume some of
the diagrams contain errors, leading you to include additional time to
account for the expected difficulties? You may also document activity
attributes, comprised of such information as predecessor and successor
activities, resource requirements, constraints, and so on. All this supple-
mentary information will further help you in our next step: developing
the project schedule.

Developing the Project Schedule

Now that you have created your list of activities, sequenced them, and
estimated the time to perform each, you are ready to create your proj-
ect schedule. We will use the coding system in the lower right corner of
Exhibit 5.3 to keep things straight. Each activity name, abbreviation, and
estimated duration is put in its own box (also referred to as a node in PM
terminology).
The outside four corners of each activity box will represent the activ-
ity’s early start (ES), early finish (EF), late start (LS), and late finish (LF)
74 PROJECT MANAGEMENT ESSENTIALS

times (you can use hours, days, weeks, etc. as long as you are consistent
throughout). These labels refer to the soonest or latest time an activity can
begin and end and are used to determine the project’s critical path. We
will also calculate float and place that to the immediate left of each activity
box. Float, also called slack, is the amount of flexibility a particular activ-
ity has in the schedule. In other words, it is the length of time the activity
can be delayed from its ES without delaying the project. As you will see,
activities on the critical path will have a float of 0, which means they can-
not be delayed without causing a delay to the project. We will show an
example in Exhibit 5.4.
If we used software such as Microsoft Project, we would use calendar
dates taking holidays and weekends into consideration. When we cal-
culate by hand, we simplify. We say that any activity that can start right
away can begin after zero days. This would work just as well if our sched-
ule was in hours or weeks. We will use the two-pass method to calculate
our schedule.

Exhibit 5.3
First Pass Complete
 PROJECT SCHEDULING 75

First Pass (Forward)

Purchase wood (PW) can start right away (after zero days) and it takes
4 days to complete, so the EF is 4 days. String electrical wires (SEW) can
also start immediately and takes 8 days, so it has 8 as an EF time. Now
an activity that has only one predecessor such as assemble ramp (AR),
can begin as soon as its predecessor is done. In this case, AR can start
after 4 days and takes 3 days, so the earliest it can be done is after 7 total
days. That is pretty straightforward. However, when an activity has more
than one predecessor, you need to allow enough time for each predeces-
sor to be done. For example, hang paneling (HP) cannot start until you
have purchased the wood and strung the electrical wires behind where
you plan to hang the paneling. Therefore, HP cannot begin until after
day 8, when the slower of these two predecessor activities ends. Since it
takes 7 days to hang the paneling, this activity can be completed after
15 days. We complete our forward or first pass through the network
using this same logic on all our activities. The project end occurs when
the last activity is complete—in this case, after 20 days. This is shown
in Exhibit 5.3.

Second Pass (Backward)

The first pass showed us how soon each activity could finish. Now we work
backward asking how late each activity could finish and then how late it
could start. Since the project will end after 20 days, the two activities that
are last both need to end by then. Therefore, both paint all wood (PAW)
and turn on electricity (TOE) are shown with a LF (in their lower right
corners) of 20.
We then subtract the estimated durations from the LF to calculate the
LS. For example, PAW must end by 20 and takes 5 days, so it must start
no later than after day 15. TOE takes only 1 hour and since it needs to be
completed by day 20, we must start turning it on no later than day 19.
When there is more than one arrow out of an activity, you must allow
enough time for each path of activities that follow to be complete. When
we did our first pass going forward, if there were multiple predecessor
activities, we deferred to the time of the predecessor activity that took
76 PROJECT MANAGEMENT ESSENTIALS

longest to complete. Going backward is just the opposite, so we choose

the shorter time because it allows all successor activities enough time to
finish. For example, all three activities of install railings (IR), AR, and
HP depend on purchasing the wood. IR must start no later than day
13. AR must start no later than day 12. HP must start no later than day
8. Choose the smallest number, day 8, to allow all following activities
enough time. If you chose any number larger than day 8, HP would be
late. See Exhibit 5.4 to see the second pass complete.

Exhibit 5.4
Second Pass Complete

Identifying the Critical Path

The combination of sequencing and duration estimating give us the

critical path—that is the longest series of activities in the project. If we
want to complete the project faster, we need to speed up something on
the critical path. Conversely, if anything on the critical path is delayed,
the entire project is delayed. We now can use our schedule to determine
 PROJECT SCHEDULING 77

which activities must be conducted exactly when scheduled (those on

the critical path) and which ones have flexibility. Again, this flexibility
is called float or slack and is shown to the immediate left of the activity.
Float is calculated by:

Late Start (LS) – Early Start (ES) = Float

For example, AR could start as soon as 4 days or could be delayed to

start as late as 12 days with no impact on the rest of the schedule. There-
fore, assemble ramp’s float is calculated as 12 − 4 = 8.

Exhibit 5.5
Critical Path Identified

The sequence of activities from start to finish with zero slack is called
the critical path and is usually marked vividly (i.e., Microsoft Project de-
notes the critical path in red). The float for each activity and the critical
path are shown on Exhibit 5.5.
78 PROJECT MANAGEMENT ESSENTIALS

Showing Your Schedule on a Gantt Chart

We need the logic of the network diagram as shown above to create a project
schedule, but it is not always the best way to communicate the schedule. For
that we use a simple bar chart called a Gantt chart. To create a Gantt chart,
each activity will have its own row, so for our example project, we show
purchase wood (PW), SEW, and so on. We need to create a horizontal scale
large enough to read but small enough to show the entire project and con-
sistent throughout, so people looking at it will get the correct impression.
We usually mark critical path activities in red or in bold, if our work is
black and white, so people notice them. We draw a bar from ES to EF and
mark the times to make it easy for people to read. We do this first for all criti-
cal path activities. Then we use blue or nonbold for noncritical activities. We
front-load the schedule, meaning we use ES and finish times as the endpoints
of our bars. Finally, we show the float for the noncritical activities. (Remem-
ber, critical activities have no float.) One easy way to do this is to extend a
dotted black line out to the LF for the activity, as that represents the end of
its float. The Gantt chart for this example project is shown in Exhibit 5.6.
Gantt charts work well whether you are using Waterfall, Agile, or
a hybrid project life cycle. However, remember that when working on
Agile projects, a team creates their schedule one sprint at a time. One
simple example of a roadmap in the Agile world is the schedule for a
musician’s concert tour as shown in Exhibit 5.7. The idea is to make sure
that there are timelines for easy tracking, ownership, and accountability
at one glance. Here is a roadmap that shows three sprints with high and
detailed level tasks identified that need to be completed during sprints.

Exhibit 5.6
Gantt Chart
 PROJECT SCHEDULING 79

Exhibit 5.7
Agile Example of Gantt Chart

Source: Raji Sivaraman

Assigning Workers
Once you have identified all the work activities needed to create your
project deliverables, you will want to assign responsibility for completing
each. Further, you will want to ensure that all necessary communication
and approvals take place. An easy way to do this is with a matrix called a
RACI chart. RACI is an acronym standing for responsible, accountable,
consult, and inform.
A good practice is to have only one person accountable for the results
of a given work activity. That may or may not be the person who is
responsible for performing the work. Frequently the project manager is
accountable for many of the activities even though other team members
may be responsible for performing some of the tasks. Similarly, on a few
major items, the sponsor may have accountability while the project man-
ager has responsibility. A myriad of other stakeholders may need to be
consulted for their opinions or at least informed of what transpires.
80 PROJECT MANAGEMENT ESSENTIALS

When constructing a RACI chart, the first column is the name of the
activities. The remaining columns are for the various stakeholders. In our
example, we will keep it simple with just the sponsor, project manager,
and two core team members. Frequently, there will be quite a few more
stakeholders. Sometimes a stakeholder has no involvement and no need
to be informed of a particular activity like Bill on SEW as shown in Ex-
hibit 5.8.

Exhibit 5.8
RACI Chart
Work Package or Project
Activity Sponsor Manager Brenda Bill
Purchase Wood (PW) A R    
String Electrical Wires (SEW) I C A  
Install Railings (IR)   A R I
Assemble Ramp (AR)   C C A
Hang Paneling (HP)   A C R
Install Fixtures (IF) I A R R
Paint All Wood (PAW) I I A
Turn on Electricity (TOE) I A R C

Identifying Resource Overloads

Remember that there are multiple constraints that can limit how fast a
project can be completed. The emerging schedule you have created with a
network diagram and then shown on a Gantt chart is based upon two of
those limiting factors: the estimated duration of each individual activity
and the logical order in which you can perform them. We now turn our
attention to a third constraint: the availability of the right workers when
you need them.
We will continue to use the same example. For simplicity sake, let’s
say we have two workers and either can do any of the activities. We now
want to discover if we have scheduled more than two workers at the same
time and, if so, what can we do about it. We will use the same scale as the
 PROJECT SCHEDULING 81

Gantt chart and construct a histogram showing the demand for workers
directly beneath the Gantt. When we glance at the Gantt, it appears that
sometimes we might have scheduled three workers, so we will make our
histogram three workers high.
We begin by placing the critical path activities on the bottom row.
The reason for this is we might have to change when some activities are
scheduled, and we know we do not want to change the critical path as that
would delay the entire project. The first activity on the critical path is SEW.
Therefore, the first block of work shown is one worker high by 8 hours
long and SEW is shown in that block. That is followed by the other two
critical path activities, HP from 9 to 15 and PAW from 16 to 20. Now we
begin to stack simultaneous activities vertically. PW also takes one worker
and its ES and EF go from time zero to four. AR follows at four to seven.
IR would need a third worker from four to six, so it is built up to the third
row. Install fixtures (IF) from 9 to 14 and TOE on day 15 would also be
on the second row above HP. We have an overload shown with need for a
third worker from hours 4 to 6. This is all shown in Exhibit 5.9.

Exhibit 5.9
Worker Overloads Identified

Remember that we scheduled everything as early as possible. There-

fore, we cannot move anything earlier, but we can move activities later if
they have enough float and still complete the project on time. To do this,
we essentially “play Tetris.” In that game, you try to fit shapes into spaces.
82 PROJECT MANAGEMENT ESSENTIALS

We will try to delay activities while remembering their logical order and
amount of float. In our example, if we delay the start of IR 3 days, it can
be rescheduled for the second worker after AR is complete. That would
mean we need to delay IF and TOE a day each, as there was only space
for a day after AR (day 8) in the original schedule. Each of these activities
had more float than the 1 or 2 days we used up by delaying them. This is
all shown in Exhibit 5.10.

Exhibit 5.10
Worker Overload Resolved by Playing Tetris
Number of Workers
Needed
3
2 PW AR IR IF TE
1 SEW HP PAW

On many projects, at least some of the overloads can be resolved in

this manner. Even when all of the overloads cannot be fully resolved this
way, at least you now know exactly which activities, which people, and
which times of your schedule are in conflict. You can consider looking at
alternative means to further resolve conflicts. Finally, you may need to go
to your sponsor for help, armed with specific information and proof that
you did what you could to try to resolve the conflicts in advance.

Using Software
If you have not been doing so already, at this stage in project planning
you will almost certainly want to use project software such as Microsoft
Project. As long as you have accurate data to provide, the software will
help you aggregate information from many of your planning documents,
including:

• Activity List;
• Activity Duration Estimates;
 PROJECT SCHEDULING 83

• Activity Attributes;
• Project Schedule Network Diagrams—the logical relationships
of predecessors and successors you came up with during Sequence
Activities;
• Activity Resource Requirements—the types and quantities of re-
sources needed for each activity;
• Resource Calendars—include typical days and hours worked and
individual workers’ schedules (vacation time, maternity leave, etc.);
• Project Scope Statement—we include this because it details the
constraints and assumptions that may affect our project;
• Risk Register (you created this in Chapter 4);
• Project Staff Assignments—specify which resources are assigned to
each activity.

Summary
You will use the work packages from your WBS to determine the actual
activities that need to be accomplished to complete your project and how
long each activity will take. Logic will help you decide the order in which
to accomplish the various activities, and the sequence of activities that
lasts the longest from start to finish will be your critical path. Throughout
the execution of your project you must take care not to delay activities on
the critical path unless absolutely necessary since any change to the criti-
cal path will delay your overall project.
Only after you have decided on the order of activities will you begin
assigning them to your human resources. If your schedule shows more
activities taking place simultaneously than your workforce can accom-
modate, you have a resource overload and must find a way to adapt the
schedule—if at all possible, without making changes to the critical path as
not to delay the project. Use the two-pass method detailed in this chapter
to determine the critical path and float/slack of all noncritical activities.

Key Questions

1. How will you create a project schedule by defining and sequencing work
activities into a network schedule and then identifying the critical path?